oil was a pyramid scheme. only those early to the party made money by dumping on us latecomers bagholders!

social security is the biggest pyramid scheme in history, it's just that it is a cleverly disguised long con, designed to appeal humanities weakest emotional reactions, fear, pity, altruism

This. I've come across several analyses over the years the compare the amount paid into the system to the amount taken out of the system by various generations (in real terms). The silent generation received something like 400% more economic value than they paid in, of course it's a great system! The boomers are getting more than their fair share.

However over the long run, economic value in can only equal economic value out. The silent generation and boomers are getting more than their fair share by creating debt to be paid by the next generations. This is not bond style debt, but debt in the form of unfunded liabilities. However now that the worker to taker ratio is around 2:1 this debt expansion will stall, generation X is guaranteed to receive less than it's fair share.

And the millennials? Those who overwhelmingly support the EU socialist model? They are in effect debt slaves and don't even realize it since it's not debt that shows up in their household balance sheet.

I refuse to believe that he can not understand this, and instead believe he is simply trying out and testing new FUD against bitcoin here. Some FUD is easily refuted, other FUD requires more discussion and understanding. He has already said that he is working with his government on educating the public on the scam that is bitcoin.

yes Chief FUD Tester ... if he can get some FUD to fly here he runs with it and disseminates it to the other FUDsters. It is immaterial if that FUD has valid basis in logic or has technical merit or not because the aim is to generate as much FUD as possible to discredit, not to actually critique cryptocurrencies or bitcoin technology.

it's been obvious for months on end that no matter how thoroughly one of his arguments gets answered, he will attempt to refine it or come up with a different one to the same effect (that bitcoin will fail). this conclusion has been decided in advance and is immune to change. thus he is not engaging in rational debate.

which is also the reason why he is not going to take up that bet.

on the other hand, the fact that after the massive effort --whether individual or collective-- none of the arguments to the pre-established conclusion are convincing, is highly illustrative. so thanks for that.

There would be no point. Focus on users, not miners, for a monent. The have a choice:

Option 1. Hard forked chain that that pays more to miners

Option 2. Hard forked chain that does not pay more to miners

Users would choose #2. Miners would choose #1

Miners are by definition sellers of bitcoin, users are both buyers and sellers. Chain two would have both sellers and buyers. Chain 1 would have sellers but no buyers, and would therefore have no value. ASIC miners would face the choice to waste electricity mining a worthless coin or shut down.

Options 1 and 2 are different coins, that will have different market prices and different expectations of survival. Each old bitcoin user starts out with the same number of coins in both chains. There is no option for him to take: if he does not spend or sell the coins in one chain, they will simply sit there, as if he had decided to hoard them. He could burn them, but that would mean throwing some value away -- and would make the price of that coin to rise.

So the question is not "which coin would the users choose", but "what will happen to the market price of each coin".

Coin 1 is just the same old bitcoin, with the same network and protocol, minus a reward halving that was scheduled to occur and will be postponed. It will keep working smoothly through the transiiton. Its price may fall considerably, but it is unlikely to become insignificant.

Coin 2 is a brand new coin that happens to start with the same coin assignments, but has yet to build its network. There is a bunch of rich guys out there -- the old bitcoin miners and their investors -- who have hundreds of millions of dollars at stake invested in coin 1, and therefore are quite interested in having the price of coin 2 crash so that it will not steal market value from coin 1.

So, except for the ideologues, if someone wanted to invest some money in "bitcoin" after the change, which of the two bitcoins would he choose?

Except for the ideologues, once the cartel has announced his plans, how many bitcoiners would still wish for the Red Button to be pressed? If the button is pressed, how many will do whatever they could to kill coin 2?

Perhaps, as you say, there will be smart guys who will wait for the cartel to stop jamming coin 2 and then will start mining it, or buy tons of it as penny stock, counting on its recovery. But, if that strategy turns out to be profitable, what would stop other people from forking other Red-Button-style clones of bitcoin?

Note that altcoins are created not because they can be better than bitcoin (which in some cases may be true), but because their creators think: "Why should I buy an existing coin, and see its early adopters become filthy rich at my expense, when I can create my own altcoin, and become filthy rich at other people's expense?"

It seems that you believe that the Red-Button coin 2 will prevail (or at least survive) for a similar reason, namely it would give to ordinary PC owners the opportunity to become early miners of "bitcoin" again, and amass a hoard of "bitcoin" with little cost. That cloned "bitcoin" would have a low price perhaps, but all users of the old bitcoin would automatically be its users too, and (by your belief) it would have a nonzero chance of conquering the bitcoin market.

But, if so, what will stop people from creating more such clones, independently of any 51% threat?

These possibilities with two or more clones of bitcoin are already too confusing for me to reason about them. After all, I am already unable to see why bitcoin would survive in the long term, even with no clones and no 51% shenaniigans. Lucky for you that your beliefs a priori exclude the possibility of protocol changes, 51% attacks, hard clones, and anything that might be a problem for bitcoin.

Academic interest in bitcoin only. Not owner, not trader, very skeptical of its longterm success.

PS. I find this discussion bizarre, because until a month ago bitcoiners claimed that altcoins would die because they did not have the huge mining network that bitcoin has. Now it is the number of users that matters? Then Auroracoin must have been a success -- didn't they "airdrop" some AUR to every person in Iceland?

Academic interest in bitcoin only. Not owner, not trader, very skeptical of its longterm success.

Note that altcoins are created not because they can be better than bitcoin (which in some cases may be true), but because their creators think: "Why should I buy an existing coin, and see its early adopters become filthy rich at my expense, when I can create my own altcoin, and become filthy rich at other people's expense?"

BCnext launched Nxt for exactly 21 BTC, it was by design as the number 21 was symbolic to him, once he hit that mark he closed investment and launched. BTC was valued at about the same amount as now when he closed funding. So your point is not true. Not everyone is purely money motivated. The people that called his distribution a scam were day traders who were angry they didn't participate during the two months the IPO was open. Of course, Nxt isn't really an alt coin in the true sense of the form, because it's not a clone of anything.

Note that altcoins are created not because they can be better than bitcoin (which in some cases may be true), but because their creators think: "Why should I buy an existing coin, and see its early adopters become filthy rich at my expense, when I can create my own altcoin, and become filthy rich at other people's expense?"

BCnext launched Nxt for exactly 21 BTC, it was by design as the number 21 was symbolic to him, once he hit that mark he closed investment and launched. BTC was valued at about the same amount as now when he closed funding. So your point is not true. Not everyone is purely money motivated. The people that called his distribution a scam were day traders who were angry they didn't participate during the two months the IPO was open. Of course, Nxt isn't really an alt coin in the true sense of the form, because it's not a clone of anything.

I accept that there may be exceptions. I believe my analysis above applies to most of what people call "pump-and-dump" or "junk" cryptocoins. (I called them "altcoins" out of laziness, it is easier to type.)

Academic interest in bitcoin only. Not owner, not trader, very skeptical of its longterm success.

Note that altcoins are created not because they can be better than bitcoin (which in some cases may be true), but because their creators think: "Why should I buy an existing coin, and see its early adopters become filthy rich at my expense, when I can create my own altcoin, and become filthy rich at other people's expense?"

BCnext launched Nxt for exactly 21 BTC, it was by design as the number 21 was symbolic to him, once he hit that mark he closed investment and launched. BTC was valued at about the same amount as now when he closed funding. So your point is not true. Not everyone is purely money motivated. The people that called his distribution a scam were day traders who were angry they didn't participate during the two months the IPO was open. Of course, Nxt isn't really an alt coin in the true sense of the form, because it's not a clone of anything.

I accept that there may be exceptions. I believe my analysis above applies to most of what people call "pump-and-dump" or "junk" cryptocoins. (I called them "altcoins" out of laziness, it is easier to type.)

Most people here think that anything other than BTC is a pump and dump junk coin.

There would be no point. Focus on users, not miners, for a monent. The have a choice:

Option 1. Hard forked chain that that pays more to miners

Option 2. Hard forked chain that does not pay more to miners

Users would choose #2. Miners would choose #1

Miners are by definition sellers of bitcoin, users are both buyers and sellers. Chain two would have both sellers and buyers. Chain 1 would have sellers but no buyers, and would therefore have no value. ASIC miners would face the choice to waste electricity mining a worthless coin or shut down.

Options 1 and 2 are different coins, that will have different market prices and different expectations of survival.

Already explained that users and only users can give market value. Miners can only hold or sell, but they have no reason to buy. If you don't attract (non-mining) users, you're dead.

Quote

Coin 1 is just the same old bitcoin

It's not. It changed. With a bit of forward looking, one can easily see that it would be changed again.

After all, repeat your plan, exactly as you have stated it:

If miners can fork the protocol to double their rewards once, why can't they do it again? If they can, users will recognize that, and avoid such a coin like the plague, as it is sure to be diluted to nothing.

Your plan, by its own mechanism with no assumptions about alternative mining, fails, because it only succeeds if you stop the game after one iteration, yet the game itself contains no mechanism to prevent such repetition. QED

PS. I find this discussion bizarre, because until a month ago bitcoiners claimed that altcoins would die because they did not have the huge mining network that bitcoin has. Now it is the number of users that matters? Then Auroracoin must have been a success -- didn't they "airdrop" some AUR to every person in Iceland?

Mining can not and does not give a coin value. Mining chases value. If mining gave value then perhaps the value of LTC would have gone up when it switched to "more secure" ASIC mining. In fact its value has gone (almost) to zero.

Mining does one and only one thing, which is limit and disincentivize ballot stuffing by forcing real resources to be used to vote. Any reasonable sort of mining will suffice and it is the value of a coin that determines the amount of mining, not vice versa.

Yes, and what I'm saying is there is no cartel. A cartel implies there is some barrier to entry (for example by limited capacity of equipment). There is none here; everyone can mine, and in a protocol that hasn't reached the stage of specialized hardware, the startup costs are low and entry is very rapid. A huge amount of mining would come online within a day or two, and remember your proposal is for all this to be announced a month ahead, so plenty of time to get ready.

You are making a valiant effort smooth, but it is not one you are going to win with this one. He make the same argument with me, in that a mining cartel could "block" all transactions they want. He refused to acknowledge that a non-conforming cartel would simply be removed from the pool, and the network would continue with the remain honest miners. He refuses to understand that the network will continue as long as there are some remaining honest miners to generate blocks.

I refuse to believe that he can not understand this, and instead believe he is simply trying out and testing new FUD against bitcoin here. Some FUD is easily refuted, other FUD requires more discussion and understanding. He has already said that he is working with his government on educating the public on the scam that is bitcoin.

I also get the impression that we are writing a paper for him, that discredits his imagined dystopia.

Sure it could happen, it would just take a massive preponderance of stupidity and/or lack of self interest, or coercion.If it did happen, I would suspect the coercion first. Most miners of any significance have plenty of self interest and very little stupidity.

Yes, and what I'm saying is there is no cartel. A cartel implies there is some barrier to entry (for example by limited capacity of equipment). There is none here; everyone can mine, and in a protocol that hasn't reached the stage of specialized hardware, the startup costs are low and entry is very rapid. A huge amount of mining would come online within a day or two, and remember your proposal is for all this to be announced a month ahead, so plenty of time to get ready.

You are making a valiant effort smooth, but it is not one you are going to win with this one. He make the same argument with me, in that a mining cartel could "block" all transactions they want. He refused to acknowledge that a non-conforming cartel would simply be removed from the pool, and the network would continue with the remain honest miners. He refuses to understand that the network will continue as long as there are some remaining honest miners to generate blocks.

I refuse to believe that he can not understand this, and instead believe he is simply trying out and testing new FUD against bitcoin here. Some FUD is easily refuted, other FUD requires more discussion and understanding. He has already said that he is working with his government on educating the public on the scam that is bitcoin.

I also get the impression that we are writing a paper for him, that discredits his imagined dystopia.

Sure it could happen, it would just take a massive preponderance of stupidity and/or lack of self interest, or coercion.If it did happen, I would suspect the coercion first. Most miners of any significance have plenty of self interest and very little stupidity.

That's a good way to put it. He keeps putting up detailed scenarios, and then always asks "isn't this right" or "what is wrong with this" or "please read x, y, z and tell me what is wrong". Then someone does so, and he ignores the replies and comes back with a different scenario and repeats. Going onto internet forums and trolling for peer review is a pretty pathetic manner for one to perform research.

There is a lot of scope for Bitcoin in gaming industry; however, this has not yet been explored. The step from Apple to approve a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in real Bitcoin, recently releasing it onto the iTunes store, is going to encourage others in the fray. A lot of game lovers have appreciated the measure from Apple.According to the sources the game, SaruTobi, lets users swing a monkey from a vine, building up momentum before releasing him to collect power-ups and Bitcoin tokens as he frolics though the air. Developer Christian Moss told the media professionals that SaruTobi is literally Japanese for ‘Monkey Fly’, and this is pretty much the premise of the game.He says that the user flings him across an 8-bit jungle collecting floating Bitcoin along the way. According to him he was in the process of adding typical Super Mario-style coins into the game when it occurred to him to use Bitcoin instead. He admits that he thought it would be a nice way to introduce Bitcoin to people who are not familiar with it yet.The approval from Apple is also an indication that somewhere people at the organization think that the digital world can truly be Bitcoin’s natural environment. The iOS game has three main aims – attaining the greatest distance, collecting Bitcoin tokens to be spent on in-app items, and collecting the letters ‘SARUTOBI’ to unlock a Bitcoin ‘boost’ to spend on in-game items.A Long Way to Go Says Christian Moss, the DeveloperDeveloper Christian Moss says that the Bitcoin tips come from the game’s shared Bitcoin wallet, called a ‘pot’, revenue generated by the game (from in-app purchases and ads) is converted into Bitcoin and added to the pot. He informs that after the user has played the game for a certain amount of time, the game will reward the user by sending them a Bitcoin tip.Moss is of the view that though he has come across a few concept games that use Bitcoin micro-transactions, nothing on the iOS app store he believes having a popular iOS app that incorporates Bitcoin can go a long way to helping it become mainstream. He further says that he is currently working on a new Bitcoin mining game.He concludes and says that it is still in the early stages of development; however, the player will be able to dig, similar to Minecraft, and collect real Bitcoin."

There is a lot of scope for Bitcoin in gaming industry; however, this has not yet been explored. The step from Apple to approve a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in real Bitcoin, recently releasing it onto the iTunes store, is going to encourage others in the fray. A lot of game lovers have appreciated the measure from Apple.According to the sources the game, SaruTobi, lets users swing a monkey from a vine, building up momentum before releasing him to collect power-ups and Bitcoin tokens as he frolics though the air. Developer Christian Moss told the media professionals that SaruTobi is literally Japanese for ‘Monkey Fly’, and this is pretty much the premise of the game.He says that the user flings him across an 8-bit jungle collecting floating Bitcoin along the way. According to him he was in the process of adding typical Super Mario-style coins into the game when it occurred to him to use Bitcoin instead. He admits that he thought it would be a nice way to introduce Bitcoin to people who are not familiar with it yet.The approval from Apple is also an indication that somewhere people at the organization think that the digital world can truly be Bitcoin’s natural environment. The iOS game has three main aims – attaining the greatest distance, collecting Bitcoin tokens to be spent on in-app items, and collecting the letters ‘SARUTOBI’ to unlock a Bitcoin ‘boost’ to spend on in-game items.A Long Way to Go Says Christian Moss, the DeveloperDeveloper Christian Moss says that the Bitcoin tips come from the game’s shared Bitcoin wallet, called a ‘pot’, revenue generated by the game (from in-app purchases and ads) is converted into Bitcoin and added to the pot. He informs that after the user has played the game for a certain amount of time, the game will reward the user by sending them a Bitcoin tip.Moss is of the view that though he has come across a few concept games that use Bitcoin micro-transactions, nothing on the iOS app store he believes having a popular iOS app that incorporates Bitcoin can go a long way to helping it become mainstream. He further says that he is currently working on a new Bitcoin mining game.He concludes and says that it is still in the early stages of development; however, the player will be able to dig, similar to Minecraft, and collect real Bitcoin."

I hope the game will become popular. This could potentially introduce bitcoin to millions of people. Perhaps, kids will adopt bitcoin and become 'native' users. I could easily see kids earning tiny amounts of bitcoin in these kind of games and then using those bitcoins to buy stuff from each other or from some internet site.

There is a lot of scope for Bitcoin in gaming industry; however, this has not yet been explored. The step from Apple to approve a retro-styled iOS game that tips players in real Bitcoin, recently releasing it onto the iTunes store, is going to encourage others in the fray. A lot of game lovers have appreciated the measure from Apple.According to the sources the game, SaruTobi, lets users swing a monkey from a vine, building up momentum before releasing him to collect power-ups and Bitcoin tokens as he frolics though the air. Developer Christian Moss told the media professionals that SaruTobi is literally Japanese for ‘Monkey Fly’, and this is pretty much the premise of the game.He says that the user flings him across an 8-bit jungle collecting floating Bitcoin along the way. According to him he was in the process of adding typical Super Mario-style coins into the game when it occurred to him to use Bitcoin instead. He admits that he thought it would be a nice way to introduce Bitcoin to people who are not familiar with it yet.The approval from Apple is also an indication that somewhere people at the organization think that the digital world can truly be Bitcoin’s natural environment. The iOS game has three main aims – attaining the greatest distance, collecting Bitcoin tokens to be spent on in-app items, and collecting the letters ‘SARUTOBI’ to unlock a Bitcoin ‘boost’ to spend on in-game items.A Long Way to Go Says Christian Moss, the DeveloperDeveloper Christian Moss says that the Bitcoin tips come from the game’s shared Bitcoin wallet, called a ‘pot’, revenue generated by the game (from in-app purchases and ads) is converted into Bitcoin and added to the pot. He informs that after the user has played the game for a certain amount of time, the game will reward the user by sending them a Bitcoin tip.Moss is of the view that though he has come across a few concept games that use Bitcoin micro-transactions, nothing on the iOS app store he believes having a popular iOS app that incorporates Bitcoin can go a long way to helping it become mainstream. He further says that he is currently working on a new Bitcoin mining game.He concludes and says that it is still in the early stages of development; however, the player will be able to dig, similar to Minecraft, and collect real Bitcoin."

I hope the game will become popular. This could potentially introduce bitcoin to millions of people. Perhaps, kids will adopt bitcoin and become 'native' users. I could easily see kids earning tiny amounts of bitcoin in these kind of games and then using those bitcoins to buy stuff from each other or from some internet site.

I would have thought Zynga would have done this long ago. I hope they become the next Zynga.

Any significantly advanced cryptocurrency is indistinguishable from Ponzi Tulips.

Although I can't think of a practical scenario where a typical user would ever be exposed to this, yes, the concern is side-channel attacks (e.g., a timing attack):

( ... cut a lot of helpful links, quote and explanations ... )

I think deterministic signatures are much more important than constant-time signatures (there's been a non-trivial amount of funds lost due to the repeat k-value problem but I doubt a single satoshi has ever been lost due to a genuine side-channel attack). Someone like gmaxwell could comment better on the practical risks here…

I concur with all you said. I think that Pieter Wuille took a chance to snap in this "constant time" thing while writing libsecp256k1. What seems weird to me is that they don't mention the main advantage of replacing OpenSSL with such "custom made" signing tool: speed.

Quoting a gmaxwell's email to the bitocoin-development mailing list (related to the headers-first sync feature):

Quote from: gmaxwell

(I'm using 295k as the target here because after that point ecdsadominates, and then your 6+x faster libsecp256k makes more of adifference)

(bold is mine)

about that matter, this is an interesting post on reddit by gmaxwell (aka nullc):